Other people’s lives: Freemasons, gangsters, a cat killer and the Cold War

Owners of fine petrol stations across UK

Last night, I went to Stowmarket in Suffolk to see two excellent Edinburgh Fringe preview shows by Doug Segal and Juliette Burton.

On the way back, just before midnight, I filled up at a BP petrol station somewhere on or near the A14.

Inside, a man dressed as a green duck was talking to a woman dressed as a yellow chicken.

“It was brown and grey and French,” the man said.

“Karen has always been difficult,” the woman replied.

Then they left.

Despite that, I have no particular blog to write this morning, so I idly looked through some old diaries at what happened today in previous years. These are extracts, going back in time to another era. Some names have been removed.

Two negotiation tools often used to settle disputes in Glasgow

5th MAY 2002

In  the evening, I went with (a fairly well-known English comedian) to a gig at a Masonic Hall in Easterhouse, a legendarily rough part of Glasgow. The low, unmarked building was surrounded by empty space, like a free-fire zone, and had 7 ft tall spiked grey metal railings surrounding it with barbed wire on parts of the roof. There was a full house: perhaps 150 people, all dressed up in their Sunday best as if for a West End occasion. They hated (the fairly well-known English comedian’s) performance. Their favourite star was ‘Christian’ a 64-year-old who sings as if it were still the 1970s.

The son of one of the people who ran the club told us: “My nose is getting better now. It’s still just tender here, towards the top.”

The other night, he had been driving home from some late night DJ work and stopped at a petrol station. After paying, he walked back towards his car. A man appeared, said “No-one talks to my wife like that!” and hit him.

Three other men then appeared and all four attacked him, knocking him down and kicking him, breaking his nose.

The police say they have the men’s faces and the number plate of their car on video but, because the beating itself is not seen on any video, there is no point finding and prosecuting them.

It seems that the DJ boy, drunk, had reached the pay counter at the same time as the angry man’s wife and (he says) told her: “You go first.”

Seeing this from outside, the other man and his friends somehow misinterpreted what had happened and got angry.

How is this common sight linked to the Great Train Robbery?

5th MAY 2000

I had lunch with a chum. Last week, (a prominent London gangster) told him one of the Great Train Robbers who was never caught is black and now works as a London cab driver. He kept all of his share.

My chum went to Charlie Kray’s recent funeral in Bethnal Green. As Reggie Kray came out of church after the service, handcuffed to a policewoman, my chum found himself shouting “Let him out!” and it was taken up by the rest of the hundreds of bystanders. When Reggie went to his brother Ronnie Kray’s funeral, he was handcuffed to two gigantic policemen to make him look small, but instead it made him look very dangerous. This time, my chum reckoned, he had been handcuffed to a woman to try to belittle him in fellow-gangsters’ eyes.

Later, I talked with another chum on the phone. She has just got back from cruising the Caribbean in a yacht. She said the Caribbean is full of white South Africans who have left the country and put all their money into buying yachts and cruisers. She said her bottom was probably on the Internet because one man spent 39 days sailing from South Africa to the Caribbean and, when he got there, he was greeted by her buttocks exposed to him spelling out WELCOME NICK.  He took a digital photograph to send to his friends as an e-mail attachment.

Portrait of a pitiless kitty killer with a track record

5th MAY 1999

I had lunch with a chum at BBC Television Centre in Wood Lane.

Last weekend, he and his girlfriend went to Chichester, where she has friends. In the evening, they were all watching a video of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Halfway through, the chief baddie was saying something to the effect of: “If things don’t happen, people will lose their digits.”

At this point, the living room door was suddenly pushed open – slammed open, really – by the family cat, who entered the room with the hind legs of a rabbit dangling from its bloodied mouth. The cat strode in, dropped the legs on the carpet, looked up at the humans and strode out of the room. The cat’s owner said they’d once sat and watched the same cat eat an entire rabbit in the garden, head first.

“You sat and watched?” my chum asked incredulously.

When he got back to his home in Brixton that same night, my chum found the head of a toy Teletubby (the yellow one) in his back garden. Just the head.

He recently negotiated a per-day pay rise for himself at the BBC; then negotiated a 4-day-week for himself thus, in effect, getting paid the same money for a day’s less work. He intends to try to write a novel on Mondays. His female boss is also going to take a day off work each week in an attempt to write a novel.

When I got home from the BBC lunch, I found an e-mail from another chum who works at Anglia TV:

Hey, today’s Eastern Daily Press is full of a story about an ex Anglia TV carpenter who murdered his wife and attempted to murder his daughter. You would recognise him. He looked like a little gnome and wandered around fixing things with a white coat on. He stabbed her to death because she spent more than £60 a week on the housekeeping!

Later, shopping in Tesco’s, I met the woman who used to live next door to me in Borehamwood. She, her husband, son and daughter moved to nearby Shenley about six years ago. She said her daughter was now twelve and “getting hormonal”. Nothing she (the mother) could do was right and her daughter was embarrassed by her.

Tashkent earthquake memorial in 1985

5th MAY 1985
(four years before the Berlin Wall fell)

Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

The old city was flattened by an earthquake in 1966 and rebuilt mostly in ghastly Russian tower block style.

Walking along a street this morning, I encountered three thin policemen and a tubby officer with a moustache talking to a shirt-sleeved man who seemed to have committed a traffic offence. The shirt-sleeved man took some pieces of paper out of his right-hand pocket and offered them to the officer. But the officer noticed me – an obvious tourist – approaching with a camera over my shoulder. He dismissed the man’s offer of (I presume) roubles with a wave of his hand.

Walking into the grounds of a mosque, we were given a very crude propaganda magazine about how local Moslem customs are respected and how the Soviet state is renovating mosques. The Russians must be very worried about the Moslems in Soviet Central Asia.

My German chum yesterday encountered a local Uzbek newspaper editor called Igor who had met a girl in Bulgaria whom he (Igor) wanted to marry. This romance came to the ears of the KGB who interrogated Igor and told him there was no way he could marry her.

Igor earns 250 roubles per month compared to the average of 160 roubles per month, so he is well-off. He lives in a three-room apartment – unusually spacious – but he has to share it with his brother and one other man. There are weekly political meetings at his apartment block with a register of names and it is compulsory to attend them unless you are working.

Igor came very nervously to our hotel tonight to talk to my German chum. He wants to send my German chum a book but will have to get a friend to take it to Yugoslavia and post it from there. If Igor got mail from the West, he would be questioned by the police. He tried to persuade my German chum to send him money so he can travel to Yugoslavia himself and then on to Germany. My German chum met him just outside the hotel for this chat and thought it might be some form of set-up by the security police.

British comic Matt Roper gets wet in Burma & scanned in a Bangkok hospital

(A version of this piece was published on the Indian news site WSN)

When last seen: Matt Roper in a Saigon hospital  (Photograph by nurse Than Thiet Sang)

When last heard of in this blog, British comedian Matt Roper was in a Saigon hospital suffering from deep vein thrombosis. Now he is in Bangkok. Yesterday, he told me:

“I hadn’t realised how serious the DVT was when I went into hospital. They said if I had left it a couple more days I could’ve died. I have had to totally quit smoking as it puts me at high risk for a haemorrhage – and drinking has gone out of the window too.

“I need follow-up treatment for 4-6 months. I was discharged from hospital in the middle of March but was banned from flying long-haul so had to stay in Southeast Asia for my weekly INR (blood) test. I am on drugs to thin my blood and the INR test is to make sure the dosage is correct so my blood is regulated to a normal level.

“I am meant to be home in the UK right now previewing and honing material for my Edinburgh Fringe show in August, but no can do. No Fringe show for me this year as there is no time. I am gutted.”

Matt was banned from making long-haul flights, but this did not include shorter flights, so he flew to Myanmar/Burma for nine days. These are extracts from his diary:

__________________________________________________________________________

DAY ONE

I have a bit of an accidental tradition of landing in countries when everything is closed because of a national holiday, a religious observance or some sort of civil unrest. A prime example of this was showing up in Paris during the riots of 2005. Or landing in Marrakesh midway through the month of Ramadan for a two week holiday. The latter denotes a particular lack of planning.

As my car inches its way through the traffic of the wide, tree-lined streets which take me from the airport to downtown Rangoon, it seems like I’ve landed on the set of a movie.

Happy New Year: The locals get very wet wet wet in Rangoon

Thousands of people armed with water guns, hosepipes and buckets are soaking each other and hurling vast quantities of water at the passing traffic. This is the first day of Thingyan, the Burmese New Year celebrations. Everything is closed for four days. Apart from the temples. And the taps.

On the opposite side of the road, heading towards the airport, a tourist bus crawls past us with its windows wide open. The people inside it are waving to the crowds and getting drenched.

“Japanese?” I asked my driver.

“No!” he laughed. “North Koreans.”

Finding this difficult to believe, I asked: “Are you sure? Not South Koreans? I don’t think North Koreans can travel, can they?”

“Oh yes,” he said, “they are North Koreans. We like North Korea in my country. Good friends.”

I sit back and ponder this for a bit, with eyes glazed over, until a bucket of water comes right through the car window and into my face.

DAY TWO

I acquire a guide. A sixty-something man named U Win, unusually tall, pot-bellied and balding. U Win wants to talk about George Orwell, which we do for a bit.

After a while, we sit in the shade of a tree, where he begins to talk to me about vipassanā meditation. “Do you know it?” he asks.

“Yes,” I respond, “I do know it.”

“Do you practise?” he asks.

“I went to a retreat once,” I confess, “but I left after three days… my back was in too much pain.”

“Nonsense!” he laughs. “Just let it pass!”

And that seems to nail Buddhist thought for me: Just let it pass.

“What about the army?” I ask quietly. “Do you think they practise meditation?”

He laughs loudly, looks away, thinks for a bit and comes back me: “No. The army don’t meditate.”

“Do they pray?” I ask. “Are they religious?”

“They offer prayers,” U Win responds. “But only prayers born from living in fear.”

DAY THREE

On University Avenue, I get utterly soaked during this third day of the Thingyan celebrations. At first I try to avoid it but, after a while, I throw away all inhibition and join in with it, filling up buckets with hosepipes, drenching complete strangers and passing traffic. It is enormous fun.

Aung San Suu Kyi addresses a political meeting

At sunset I head up the street to the house of Aung San Suu Kyi, hoping she will be at home to soak with water and New Year good wishes.

A ten foot wall and reinforced gates prevent me from doing so.

She is not stupid. The last thing she needs is a hippie soaked to the bone offering unsolicited hugs after a busy day working hard for democracy. Anyway, as I find out later, she is in Japan.

As I move on and nightfall descends, I fall into a gaping hole in the pavement. Pulled from the hole, bleeding from a gash to the right foot, a thought rushes to my mind: It’d be terrible for a man to come to wish a Nobel Peace Prize winner a Happy New Year and end up leaving with nothing but gangrene.

DAY FOUR

I stay in the guesthouse most of the day with the dodgy foot. I have to look after the foot and let it not get infected. It’s the foot at the end of the same leg (the right leg) in which I have deep vein thrombosis. Because I am on drugs to thin the blood, I bruise easily and, if I get a cut to the skin, it takes ages to heal over. The drugs can also make me very, very tired some of the time. And irritable. Not always, but sometimes. Today has been one of those days.

This is the only country I know where they steer right hand drive cars on the right hand side of the road. As you can imagine, being a passenger while the driver attempts to overtake somebody can be a potentially murderous experience. Fingernails into the dashboard time. This is due to an episode back in the days of the dictator Ne Win.

Ne Win, a superstitious man, one day consulted his personal fortune teller who advised him on all things auspicious and how to avoid bad fortune. Soon afterwards, the people woke up to be told – out of the blue – that from now on they must no longer drive on the left. You can imagine the chaos.

Matt saw more than just the tourist temples

DAY FIVE

A French lady named Anne comes over to join me at my table. She offers me a cigarette. “Feel free,” I tell her.

Since I quit smoking, my sweet tooth has swollen fantastically and I am making little effort to discourage it from doing so. I sit there watching her smoke while I sip my tea and eat condensed milk by the spoonful.

Anne and I sit by a lake, swampish and green. The lake is full of rubbish: floating plastic bags, empty cans and the odd sandal bobbing about. There are no bins in Burma. It depresses me. So does the bit of dog shit just a few yards in front of me. And the water fountain to my right which has run dry for the last thirty years. Three dogs are snarling and growling because another dog has had the cheek to walk into the park. I quietly mourn silence as I mourn dustbins and civic pride.

Meanwhile, a young couple walk past us hand-in-hand looking for all the world as if they’ve just entered heaven on earth.

DAY SIX

There’s a market over on 26th Street. Dead animals hang from hooks above marble slabs or over large plastic bowls flecked with blood. A bamboo cage crowded with live chickens – unaware of their delicious and hopefully well-cooked ending – shuffles very slightly by my feet. The stomach of a cow droops before me, about eye-level; the creature’s hind quarter is getting butchered noisily on the block beneath it. The tongue and the organs are all for sale. Skinned and ready to go too are all four legs complete with feet. Sellers grin widely at me, exhibiting reddened teeth stained with the residue of the betel nut, chewed for years then spat out onto the streets of Rangoon.

The streets have opened up for business following the chaos of the five day Water Festival.

Everywhere I turn, I am greeted with smiles. Genuine smiles.

Occasionally, somebody will stop me to ask which country I’m from, then which city and so on. I tell them the nearest one – Manchester.

I soon learn that you can’t move anywhere in Rangoon for running into United football supporters and, when they hear me say Manchester, they near enough explode with joy and thank me.

Cyclone Nargis: Burma’s worst natural disaster

DAY SEVEN

I took the passenger ferry across the Yangon River today to explore the town of Dalah and found myself for the first time in the Burmese countryside: swampy lakes, pagodas, bamboo houses on tall stilts. The word idyllic doesn’t seem to do it justice.

Cyclone Nargis ripped through this place back in 2008 and caused complete carnage. In total, over 150,000 people died.

The junta were still in charge with absolute power and – paranoid as ever about foreigners – refused entry to aid groups who could have treated people dying from preventable conditions. Aid workers were stranded at Rangoon Airport while the junta decided – over the course of two to three days – whether or not they would be issued with visas.

DAY EIGHT

I wonder how such gentle people as the Burmese could be ruled by such a ruthlessly brutal regime for nearly fifty years. They have so much grace.

Before the Second World War, this country was the leading exporter of rice in the world. By the late Sixties – six years after the military coup – they couldn’t feed themselves. By the Eighties they endured the humiliation of being lumped alongside North Korea among the poorest nations on earth.

Sixty million people ruled by an army of fifty thousand men. Men guilty of ethnic cleansing. Men who imprison and torture people who have opposed them. Men who think nothing of using rape against women as a weapon of war.

By releasing Aung San Suu Kyi – the symbol of the pro-democracy movement – from house arrest in 2010, the junta embarked on the final step of a meticulously designed ‘roadmap to democracy’. The following year, they held elections and – while not exactly a fully-fledged parliamentary democracy (the army having guaranteed themselves a 25% quota of government seats) – Burma has now at least a quasi-civilian government.

The internet firewalls have been removed. The press have been granted an unprecedented freedom. The intimidating signs which once warned civilians not to “be influenced by negative external forces” have been torn down. Heads of state and foreign ministers are returning from Burma telling the outside world with confidence that it is highly unlikely Burma will return to rule by the old regime.

DAY NINE

Café, Yangon Airport.

Reading the paper here, I am faced with headlines of destruction and riots between Buddhist and Muslim communities in Arakan state.

U Win Tin – that wonderful writer imprisoned by the junta for nearly 20 years – is being harassed by the authorities, while reports of forced evictions by the Tatmadaw (the army) are on the increase. I don’t know what the answers are.

I wish I did.

On the other hand, the European Union has lifted the last of its sanctions, which has led to the release of more political prisoners.

Does the army use these people as pawns in the game of politics? Or are things changing for the better? I think, perhaps both.

But what do I know? I’m too romantic. I’m too callow when it comes to the reality of politics, but I do understand people. This week has left me feeling more than hopeful about Burma and that all the talk of the Orwellian state will be a thing of the past in years to come.

My flight has just been called. It is time to ascend to the skies and hope for the best.

__________________________________________________________________________

Matt Roper is now back in Bangkok.

Yesterday, he had an ultrasound scan at a local hospital.

“They found a calcification in my flesh,” he told me. “At this point I did wonder whether the nurse wheeling me in and out of the scanning room would be the same nurse to have to lay me out. Time will tell.”

Ignore the new Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical, this is how the Profumo political sex scandal really happened

John Profumo, the UK’s disgraced Secretary of State for War

 

 

A couple of days ago in my blog, there was a discussion between comedy club owner Martin Besserman and writer Harry Rogers about whether people accused of sex crimes should be named in the press before they are prosecuted.

There is another interesting angle to this which Harry Rogers knows a bit about. Not a sex crime but a sex scandal… The Profumo sex scandal of 1963 which ultimately brought down Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government.

But this blog is really about Johnny Edgecombe, whom I think I probably met at Malcolm Hardee’s Up The Creek comedy club in Greenwich in the 1990s. By then, he was known as Johnny Edge. I have a vague recollection that Malcolm introduced me to Johnny Edge once; but I can’t be certain.

What interests me about Johnny is how small incidents in apparently insignificant individuals’ lives can change history.

For those too young to remember, the Profumo Affair involved ‘good-time party girl’ Christine Keeler having sex with John Profumo, the UK’s Secretary of State for War. This was not good, given that he was married to actress Valerie Hobson. Worse though, given that Profumo knew Britain’s entire defence secrets and this was the height of the Cold War, was that Christine Keeler was also having sex with Yevgeni Ivanov, a senior naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London. All military attachés are assumed to be spies.

In October 1962, the United States and the USSR almost stumbled into a nuclear war over the Cuban Missile Crisis.

At the same time, in London, Johnny Edgecombe was Christine Keeler’s boyfriend and allegedly her pimp. Before that, Keeler’s boyfriend had been drug dealer ‘Lucky’ Gordon. When she split from Gordon, he attacked her with an axe and held her hostage for two days. She then became Johnny Edgecombe’s girlfriend.

Just before Christmas 1962, she split from Johnny Edgecombe. What happened then resulted in a court case in which John Profumo’s name was mentioned in open court and the whole Profumo scandal became public knowledge.

Johnny Edgecombe went to prison for what happened in the mews.

I had a drink with Harry Rogers last night.

Harry Rogers remembers Johnny in Greenwich last night

“I met Johnny Edge just after he came out of prison,” Harry told me. “I think the intelligence services knew very well what was going on with Christine Keeler: that she was having an affair with Profumo and was also seeing Ivanov.”

“What had Johnny done before the Profumo thing?” I asked.

“He’d been friends with lots of jazz musicians in London,” Harry told me. “And he’d worked for Peter Rachman.”

“The dodgy slum landlord?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Harry. “Rachman bought a lot of properties up and, when he had trouble getting people out of a property, he would get Johnny Edge and a couple of others to go and take over the basement in the building and set up a shebeen. A shebeen is an illegal drinking establishment with lots of loud music pumping all night. So Johnny’s role was to set up the shebeen and get musicians to come in there and party. They had a great time and the people got so fed up with the noise they left. It was like constructive dismissal – constructive eviction, really.”

“But eventually,” I said, “he met Christine Keeler, she left him and that triggered off the whole thing.”

“Yes,” said Harry. “When Christine Keeler left him – he was kind of pimping her in a way; he was living off her earnings, anyway – he wanted money and he needed money and also Johnny was in competition with Lucky Gordon, who was out to get Johnny. He saw him as the person who had taken ‘his Christine’ away from him – cos he’d been pimping her too.

“Lucky Gordon had caught up with Johnny in the Flamingo club in Wardour Street in Soho and there had been a big running fight through the club. They were chasing each other about all over he place. Lucky Gordon was going to beat up Johnny, but Johnny pulled a knife and ‘striped’ his face.

“After that, Lucky Gordon was really, really angry and so he got a machete and he was threatening to cut Johnny Edge’s head off. And that’s why Johnny got a gun. And the gun that he got was Christine Keeler’s. She had a Luger pistol.”

“Why did she have a gun?” I asked.

“I think for protection,” Harry replied. “Anyway, Johnny took her gun and he was carrying it because he knew that, if Lucky Gordon did catch up with him – if he wasn’t protected – Lucky was going to kill him.

A 1964 book on the Profumo Scandal

“When Christine left Johnny and went to Stephen Ward in the mews, Johnny got a taxi to the house. Christine was there but wouldn’t come to the window. Mandy Rice-Davies came to the window and told Johnny Christine doesn’t want to speak to you - Here’s some money – Go away! – and threw a handful of fivers out the window.

“That made Johnny angry, so then he decided he was going to go in and talk to Christine. So he tried to do what they do in the movies. He tried to shoot the door open by blowing the lock off the door with the gun.

“That didn’t work, so then he got back into the taxi…”

“The taxi driver,” I asked, “had just been sitting there twiddling his thumbs through all this?”

“Yes,” said Harry. “The cab driver was still waiting. Johnny got back in the cab. And they drove off.

“Meanwhile, the police had been phoned. They caught up with Johnny and arrested him and charged him with attempted murder. They said he’d actually tried to shoot Christine Keeler from the street through the window. He never did that. But they needed a court case to break open the whole thing so they could officially look into everything that was going on. And, from that point onwards it all came out.

“What Johnny told me was that not only was Stephen Ward supplying various members of the Establishment with women… There were a number of them: Christine Keeler, Mandy Rice-Davies, Rona Ricardo and two or three other girls were involved in this circle, this kind of call girl ring that he was running… They would all go down to Lord Astor’s place (Clivedon in Buckinghamshire) and have the swimming pool, the weekend orgies, all the rest of it… not only was Stephen Ward doing that, but he was also supplying lots of Members of Parliament and the aristocracy with marijuana.”

“Which would be a big thing then,” I said.

“Which was a big thing then,” Harry agreed. “And which Johnny Edge was supplying to Stephen Ward.”

“How did the Russian get involved?” I asked.

Profumo resigned because he lied to MPs

“Well,” explained Harry, “Stephen Ward would host parties which diplomats and all sorts of people would attend – He was just a military attaché. I don’t think there was any attempt to screw information out of Profumo. There’s no way that Christine Keeler was pumping Profumo for information to give to Ivanov, who she called her ‘Russian teddy bear’. It was all just sex and drugs, really. But spooks, being what they are, often read a lot more into the situation than is there.

“Profumo was a pretty honourable man. He just liked screwing.”

“You’ve heard about the new Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical that’s being written about Stephen Ward?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Harry. “Johnny Edge told me Stephen Ward was a great guy and it was terrible the way he was vilified out. Really, he was just serving a need.”

“And was driven to suicide,” I said.

“And,” said Harry, “Johnny was sent to prison. He spent about six years inside. The Labour Party – Bessie Braddock in particular – said, as soon as they got into power, they would ensure he was released. But, of course, what happened when the Wilson government came in? They left him there to rot. He kept writing to them from prison trying to get them to honour what they had said they were going to do, but they left him there.

“He’d been sent to Dartmoor! For a while he shared a cell with Frank Mitchell.”

“The Mad Axeman?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Harry. “Everybody was really frightened of Frank in there. Not just the prisoners, but all the Screws. He was like an animal. But he took a liking to Johnny so, consequently, life was easy for Johnny inside because he had total protection. In those days, it wouldn’t have been easy being a black West Indian like Johnny in prison.’”

“And you met him soon after he got out?” I asked.

“When he first came out of prison,” explained Harry, “he didn’t go back to Notting Hill, he moved to a flat in Blackheath, then later he moved to a flat on a council estate by what’s now the Up The Creek comedy club.

“His aim was, if he could ever make enough money, to go out to the West Indies and buy a boat like his dad had had. Of course, it never happened.

“He would wake up in the morning and smoke a joint. Then he would get washed and dressed. Smoke another joint. Have breakfast. Smoke another joint. Then he was set up to go out for the day. He was always stoned. Always.

Johnny Edgecombe in later life + one of his cigarettes

“He decided he was going to make money from selling chess sets. He met somebody who had access to a whole load of reproduction fancy chess sets: the Lewis chess set, the Reynard The Fox one, a Mexican carved crystal one and an erotic chess set – pornographic, basically – the bishops had little boys sucking them off. They weren’t cheap. He made a good mark-up on them.

“Also, if you wanted to buy half a pound or a pound of dope, Johnny knew where to go. In 1971, you could probably get a pound of dope for £500 and he’d charge you £550. He wasn’t a big dope importer or anything, but he was big mates with Howard Marks, who was.

“After the chess sets, he got into buying VW camper vans in Amsterdam and filling them up with Second World War leather jackets and overcoats he bought in a warehouse near where he bought the VWs. They looked like Nazi overcoats but weren’t – most were actually Dutch motorcycle police coats, but they looked the business.

“So Johnny would fill the camper vans with these coats, bring them back to Britain and sell them. The rock singer Chris Farlowe used to run a Nazi militaria shop and Johnny Edge used to sell him these Dutch police overcoats as genuine Nazi wartime overcoats at a massive mark-up.

“Needs must when the Devil drives. There was no way he was ever going to get employed in a straight job; he was so stoned all the time.

“He was a very likeable guy. He was a great guy.”

“And he died just over two years ago,” I said. “What did he die of?”

“Lung cancer,” said Harry.

So it goes.

That halcyon golden era before Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and the trades unions ran the UK

In 1984, I went to the USSR. When I came back to my work at Granada TV in Manchester, I happened to mention that, in Moscow, I had taken a metro train out to the end of the line, had taken a walk round the bleak suburban area, gone into a few shops and found virtually nothing on the shelves. In particular, the food shops had a lot of empty shelves and very few items of food.

When I mentioned this to one of my Granada workmates (who had never been to the USSR but who had a university degree), she told me: “Oh! You’ve been listening to too much Western propaganda. It’s not like that.”

I have always remembered this conversation.

I told her I had been to Moscow, walked into shops and seen things.

She, never having been there, told me with total confidence that I had listened to too much anti-Soviet propaganda.

Because she knew what the truth was. She had talked to people she knew who had the same outlook as she did.

This was a university-educated person in her early thirties.

Beware of that most dangerous of all things: an airhead with a degree.

And beware of people who have inflexible opinions on events and eras which they never experienced.

I am buying a new carpet for the stairs in my house.

Yesterday, I was talking to a shop assistant who is younger than my stair carpet. My stair carpet was laid around 1986 – the height of Margaret Thatcher’s period as Prime Minister.

Also yesterday, someone not born when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister told me they found my blog of a couple of days ago very enlightening. It was about the trades unions pre-Thatcher.

Let me take you back again to that halcyon golden era before Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of the UK and ‘took on’ the unions…

When I worked at Anglia TV in Norwich, you could get no captions or graphics artwork of any kind made for an hour – sometimes two hours – in the middle of the afternoon, because that was when the Graphics Dept men (they were all men) played cards.

It was a pattern widely repeated in many ways in many other departments across the ITV network.

I started at college when Margaret Thatcher was newly Prime Minister. I took Communication Studies – it is now called Media Studies. We had lecturers who worked at the Daily Mirror newspaper.

The non-colour printed Daily Mirror in 1986

At that time, for several years past, the Daily Mirror had had colour printing machines standing in their building under covers which they had bought for large amounts of money. (Newspapers, at that time, printed photographs only in black-and-white.)

The print unions told the Daily Mirror that the machines could not be used. In fact, they told the company that, if the covers were even removed from the machines, there would be a strike which could possibly close the newspaper.

The Daily Mirror did not print colour photos regularly until 2nd June 1988, after Margaret Thatcher had ‘taken on’ the unions.

Before that, I personally knew someone who was a part-time comedy performer and also a print union member. He ‘worked’ for the Sunday Telegraph in London on a freelance basis… except he lived in Norfolk and never went in to the Telegraph building in London. His friend ‘clocked’ him in and, as far as the newspaper was concerned, his name was Michael Mouse (as in Mickey Mouse – this is NOT a joke).

Getting into the ACTT union or the print unions was difficult but, once you got in, you were untouchable and the companies were terrified of even the threat of strikes. In my view at the time, the closed-shop ACTT was 10% a union protecting its members and 90% a protection racket, coercing money from its members and controlling how the TV production companies worked.

You – and the companies – did what the all-powerful union officers said or you suffered the consequences.

Margaret Thatcher, UK trades unions and my first job in television production

I had an NUJ card because I wrote words

Margaret Thatcher became British Prime Minister in 1979.

In 1979, I was working at ATV in Birmingham as a Scriptwriter in their Promotion Dept. I had to be in the NUJ (the National Union of Journalists) because I wrote scripts. I wrote scripts for the announcers but I could not edit promotion trailers because that area of work was controlled by the ACTT, the technical union for film & TV workers.

It was impossible to work in specific jobs in TV without being in the appropriate union.

In 1979, I realised that 14th November 1980 would be the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Coventry by German aircraft. The raid destroyed 75% of the city. So I suggested to Brian Lewis, head of documentaries, that ATV should film a programme about the raid. Coventry was in the ATV region.

He was interested in the idea and asked me to do some preliminary research on the background to a documentary film, but made it clear that I could not be employed or credited as a researcher on any production, because I was a member of the NUJ, not the ACTT.

At the time, the ACTT seemed more of a protection racket than a union. The employers had to do what the unions demanded or their TV signal would be taken off air and the TV companies would make no money. The workers had to pay the union money in order to work. If you were not a union member, you were not allowed to work. Most television and film work was a closed shop and there was a Catch-22. You could not get specific jobs unless you had a union card. It was highly difficult to get a union card without already having the specific job.

I did some preliminary research for the Coventry film and talked to director John Pett who had been assigned to the project. ATV, being an honest company, paid me for my work. But I could not work on the production and got no credit. That was fine. That was the way things worked at the time.

The hour-long documentary was made, with two ACTT researchers working on the production. It was transmitted on the ITV network as Moonlight Sonata in 1980.

ACTT – more protection racket than union

Eventually, I managed to get an ACTT union card as a Researcher by getting a job on the ATV children’s TV series Tiswas.

Much later, I was able to get a coveted ACTT card as a Director in the Promotions Dept at Central, the successor to ATV. It was a long, complicated and slightly Byzantine process to get the card. At around the same time, Margaret Thatcher stopped union ‘closed shops’.

So I needed an ACTT director’s card to work as a director… I eventually got one… but, by the time I actually got a director’s card, I could have worked without having one.

Margaret Thatcher destroyed the unions’ closed shops.

Good for her.

And good everyone else except the power-crazed union bosses of the time.

Now she is dead. Her funeral is today.

So it goes.

Margaret Thatcher and naked men at a Trades Union conference in Blackpool

Mrs Thatcher & Greatest Show On Legs in 1982 Sun cartoon

Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died yesterday.

The late ‘godfather of alternative comedy’ Malcolm Hardee remembered in his 1996 autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake various occasions when he was part of The Greatest Show On Legs, performing their naked balloon dance:

“We even performed at a TUC Conference in Blackpool where Neil Innes of the Bonzo Dogs got booed off for being sexist: he was singing a song about a woman with tits and they didn’t like him. But they liked The Greatest Show on Legs naked with balloons.

“Except that we didn’t use balloons: we used photos of Mrs Thatcher to cover our genitalia and, after we turned round, our penises were sticking out of her mouth.

“They loved it.”

Political gossip. Mick Jagger fondled by MP. Cabinet Minister thrown out of pub

In Sohemia last night: Mark Seddon (left) and Martin Rowson

I went to the Sohemian Society in London last night to hear about “Gay Hussar Nights”.

The evening was billed as two insiders’ journeys through Bollinger Bolshevism with the Rabelaisian Left: “Former Tribune editor and Labour Party National Executive member, turned Al Jazeera TV correspondent Mark Seddon and multi award-winning cartoonist Martin Rowson will chew the cud and spit it all out for your delectation in an evening of downright irreverence and much jocularity all laced through with a healthy contempt for the British political and media establishment.”

And so, indeed, it turned out.

The Gay Hussar is a famed Soho pub that, in pre-Blair days, was the haunt of left wing journalists and politicians. In the 1960s, the owner threw prominent Labour Party politician George Brown out of the building when, uninvited, he started to feel-up the woman sitting next to him – which was said last night to be “the only known case of a serving Foreign Secretary being thrown out for being drunk and disorderly”.

There were also stories about “the great left wing Labour MP and serial fellationist Tom Driberg” – a gay friend of gangsters the Kray Brothers and rumoured to be a Soviet agent via the Czech intelligence service.

“When Tom got very excited about the swinging sixties,” Martin Rowson said last night, “he tried to entice Mick Jagger to stand as a Labour MP and had dinner with him in the Gay Hussar. Everything was going swimmingly well until he started fondling Mick’s knee and rather blew it, as it were.”

There were two other people at that dinner: Mick’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull and (the poet) W.H.Auden. While Tom and Mick were talking about Labour Party politics and the coming revolution, W.H.Auden asked Marianne:

“Tell me. Have you ever smuggled drugs into the country?”

To which Marianne mumbled a reply. 

“Ever take them up the arse?” asked W.H.Auden

The evening broke up shortly afterwards.

Mark Seddon is a man who obviously shares my taste for the bizarre as, last night, he recommended people should take holidays in the people’s paradise that is North Korea – he has been there seven or eight times. He also told another story about George Brown.

The esteemed Labour politician was at a ball in Lima, Peru. With music playing and, having had quite a few drinks, George Brown was feeling ‘tired and emotional’ and went up to a vision of loveliness in a long gown, saying:

“Beautiful, beautiful lady in the red dress, can I have this next dance?”

To which the reply came: “Certainly not. This is the Peruvian national anthem… and I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima.”

Comedy farter Mr Methane gets i-rate and i-noyed with Apple & Red Nose Day

Yesterday, Mr Methane got iRate about iTunes on his iPhone

There seems to be no end to the bloggability of my chum Mr Methane, the Farter of Alternative Comedy.

I got an e-mail from him yesterday afternoon:

“Just over two years ago,” it started, “I produced a Mr Methane fart app. This was rejected by iTunes and remains unpublished due to Apple’s we don’t need any more fart apps policy of September 2010.

“They told me: We cannot post this version to the App Store because we are no longer accepting this type of app. We don’t need any more Fart apps. If your app doesn’t do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted.

“But fast forward to 2013 and, in the UK, Comic Relief now have a Fart App on the Apple Store.

“Something stinks here,” Mr Methane continues, “there seems to be one rule for me and another rule for someone else! In fact, I’d like to offer Apple my app as a charity download for those people pissed off with Red Nose Day. The profits would go to children in Africa deeply traumatised by being visited by Lenny Henry every year for a Comic Relief documentary.

“Seriously, though, I think Comic Relief needs to move on, get more radical and rediscover those anarchic alternative days of the 1980s when Comedy took on the Establishment and politicians, shining a light on their inadequacies and nefarious activities.

Red Nose Day is 15th March 2013

“I honestly think that if Comic Relief said Look, everybody! This year we are raising money for humanitarian aid to help families whose lives have been wrecked by illegal attacks from US and British operated predator drones, showed a documentary about it and then asked government ministers some awkward questions, they would have the biggest take in the charity’s history.

“That said, it’s a free country – allegedly -  and some people would say that I’m just doing what I always do – Talking out of my arse!”

Charmian Hughes on disgraced Chris Huhne – and Malcolm Hardee’s balls

Chris Huhne introduced Charmian to Das Kapital and mime

My blog yesterday, in which comedian Charmian Hughes remembered her teenage crush on disgraced UK politician Chris Huhne has had more than a normal share of hits. And the Mr & ex-Mrs Huhne court soap saga is again all over today’s newspapers.

But Charmian asked me this morning: “Why is it OK for (alternative comedy godfather) Malcolm Hardee to have two driving licences, deny offences and have affairs and yet be seen as a jolly old loveable rogue as a result, but for Chris to do the same thing and to be the most vilified man in the press?”

“Perhaps,” I teased, “you still hold a torch for him? Or maybe just a small Swan Vestas match?”

“No,” Charmian replied, “but Chris was urbane, witty, clever and took my mind outside its bourgeois confines for the first time. I remember all the exotic things he introduced me to: Nescafé Continental Blend, Das Kapital, progressive underground music, mime….”

I have no answer to this.

But Charmian is taking her full-length show Charmageddon! to the Leicester Comedy Festival at the end of next week.

“The Mayans predicted the end of the world in December last year,” she told me. “It didn’t happen… But maybe we misunderstood what they meant by the end of the world. Maybe they meant the end of the world when your heart is broken, when you realise your boyfriend is imaginary, your teenage crush thinks you’re a nuisance and when you discover you are not adopted. That’s what Charmageddon! is about and it ends with the erotic Dance of the Seven Cardigans which will restore order to the universe.”

“But will it include personal stories about Chris Huhne?” I asked.

“I will probably mention him,” admitted Charmian, “I will fill in the censored bits I didn’t tell you yesterday. Charmageddon! is about what happens when your world ends.”

Later this year, she will be taking her new, as-yet untitled comedy show to the Edinburgh Fringe.

“It is going to be stories about always being a minority,” she told me this morning. “About being a girl in a boys’ school, a Catholic in a protestant family, a Catholic with a Protestant mother in a fiercely Catholic school, about my great escape from minority to belonging. I might call it Odd One Out.”

“Or Odd One In,” I suggested.

Charmian Hughes at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe

“Or not,” she said. “I performed at the last two Edinburgh Fringes after a long child-rearing break of 17 years and Edinburgh is very addictive. You get to do those student things all over again. You know – break out in hives from poor nutrition, pursue the elusive, spend a lot of time hanging out on street corners trying to attract the one you want – a big audience – obsess about whether anyone is talking about you (the legendary ‘buzz’) and then slip your sad face back despondently into your instant cappuccino. I love it.”

“When you went back to the Fringe after the 17 year break,” I asked, “did you notice a change?”

“There was more stuff,” Charmian said, “and, when I came back again, it felt like there was much more big business, corporate stuff and fewer weirdy little plays.”

When I first went up in the early 1970s,” I agreed, “it was more of a student theatre Fringe. It only started being comedy in maybe the mid-1980s.”

“The first time I went up,” said Charmian, “was with my university in about 1977. We went up to the main International Festival to do The Soldier’s Tale which was Stravinsky ballet stuff and I went up to help and also to do readings of my own poems at lunchtimes.

“At first, I didn’t get many in, but then I realised if I did it straight after The Soldier’s Tale and actually locked the audience in the room, then I had a huge audience. My poems were very long. I took my poetry very seriously.”

“And,” I asked, “you stopped because…?”

“I discovered comedy,” said Charmian immediately. “I found that people had started to laugh at my dark, dark, dark poems and I thought If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. So I discovered comedy. I’m now thinking of doing a burlesque show.”

Charmian practices her erotic burlesque dance (photograph by Kerstin Diegel)

“You are?” I asked.

“You’re suddenly interested now, aren’t you?” observed Charmian. “I think they’ll find it very interesting when I have seven cardigans and, one-by-one, I put them on in the Dance of the Seven Cardigans.”

“You got good reviews for your Edinburgh show last year.”

“I did. One reviewer said my show was ‘intelligent and well-put together’, but I didn’t use the quote in case people dug further. The same reviewer said ‘despair turns to horror’.”

“Using review quotes in Edinburgh is an art form in itself,” I suggested.

“The only trouble with Edinburgh,” said Charmian, “is it’s annoying not having a summer holiday with my family.”

“Can’t they come up to Edinburgh?”

“They want the sun,” explained Charmian.

“Ah,” I said sympathetically.

“And they distract me too much,” she added. “When my daughter came up two years ago, I found it exhausting because she didn’t understand the pain and torment we were all going through as performers and she wanted things like cake and cups of tea.”

“What pain and torment?” I asked.

“You know,” said Charmian. “Having to walk up hills. Last year, I got an Edinburgh monthly bus pass and found there was no bus that went to where I lived, so I had to walk.”

“When did you start doing comedy?” I asked.

“I think I started in about 1985 but, the first few years, I was just mucking around, doing my Teatro de Existentiale. I did Malcolm Hardee’s Tunnel Club a lot and then he would book me into weird colleges and balls.”

“Balls?” I asked.

“Balls,” confirmed Charmian. “He booked lots of us on the college circuit. We would all go off to colleges and do 20 minutes and get £90 and he would get £600 to do one joke and then walk off.”

“Did you enjoy Malcolm?” I asked.

“What can I say?” replied Charmian. “Errr… I did. I did. But I don’t like being teased. I had a family that teased me mercilessly from the moment I was born, telling me I was adopted and stuff. I find it quite hard being teased. So Malcolm probably thought I was a bit of a wet blanket and a killjoy.”

“Back in 1989, what did you think you wanted to become?” I asked.

“In 1989, I was just so relieved to be experiencing anything like comedy, because I’d had this job in advertising. Eventually I was a copywriter, but I’d had to go in at the bottom as a personnel clerk.

“I had come out of university with my degree in English and I couldn’t get any work. I just didn’t know how to present myself without apologising all the time. But that job in advertising made you lose the will to live.

“So I went to the City Lit for clowning classes just to meet different types of people and then I hung out with them, left my job and started a children’s theatre and then, at Molesworth Peace Camp, when I was a bit drunk and maybe a bit stoned, I got up on stage with a red nose on and just started mucking around and people thought I was so brilliant they threw plastic cups at me. But I felt like I’d been rescued and I didn’t care if I was good or bad, just that I was doing it.”

“Had you,” I asked, “felt the threat of ordinariness stretching ahead of you?”

“I didn’t mind being ordinary,” said Charmian, “but I hated feeling suffocated.”

“By what?” I asked.

“I… err… I’d have to go into a lot of things…” said Charmian. “I… Not professionally, but as a person… I can’t think of a funny way to say it… I had a very emotionally-abusive family who basically bullied me all the time. I felt very crushed as a person for a long time. But it’s all alright now. A lot of them died and left me their money!” Charmian laughed.

“Just performing comedy helped,” she said.

“I’ve never known anyone called Charmian before,” I said. “Where does that come from?”

“It comes from Antony & Cleopatra. Charmian and Iris were Cleopatra’s handmaidens.”

“Does ‘Charmian’ mean something?”

“Source of joy.”

“In what language?”

“Every language.”

Disgraced Chris Huhne, in poems and diaries by the teenage girl he snogged

(This was also published by the Huffington Post)

Chris Huhne, the man who snogged teenage comic Charmian

Last May, I posted a blog which was headed:

Cabinet Minister Chris Huhne and the Convent-Raised Comedian

in which comedienne Charmian Hughes remembered now-disgraced British politician Chris Huhne giving her her first snog when she was a pupil at Westminster Boys’ School (it’s a complicated story).

So, when Chris Huhne yesterday (after ten years of denying it) admitted in court to perverting the course of justice… and when his son’s venomous e-mails to him were made public this morning… I sent an e-mail to Charmian:

Any bloggable memories or comments? I asked. He seems to have been liked by his son!

Did Westminster School rate telling the truth highly? At my grammar school, they had a debating society (I wasn’t a member) where the most admired people were the ones who could successfully argue for a motion which they didn’t agree with at all… A microcosm of Parliament, I think… Lying was admired and celebrated.

Charmian Hughes at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe

Charmian replied:

All adolescents hate their parents and I hope they get through this. It is very sad. My daughter says things like that to me on a daily basis and I haven’t even done anything!

I think maybe he has confessed to save his son from going to court. It’s like A Tale of Two Cities: ”It is a far far better thing that I do now than I have ever done…”

He gave us the most fun in our teens, but not out of generosity but because we hung on to his tails by the skin of our teeth. I have a five year diary that is full of him and how amazing I thought he was.

Did you know I am a writer of serious poetry since the age of 7? So here is one written in October 1971 and guess who it is about and what it predicts. Forgive the metaphysical, meteorological and geographical confusion. These are my teenage poems about Chris.

________________

THE OSTRICH – (October 1971)

The wolves pursued me through the snow,
I was an ostrich fleeing across the strand,
aware of death if I were to let go,
I buried my head, an ostrich in the sand,
and when I reached my mother’s arms
I tried to hold her, but she let me go,
let the wolves devour me,
an ostrich in the snow.

SNOWMAN – (September 1971)

When that warmth
almost thawed the frost,
I was ready to worship the sun.
But you clothed yourself in cloud
and my heart has become numb.
Sensitivity has formed its own barricade.

Love – I have forgotten how to love;
and I am like some empty Antarctica
that nothing can penetrate.

Don’t try to melt me
or you too shall become frozen;
and two unfeeling snowmen
shall stare indifferently
at a bleak and frozen world.

LOUISE - (9th December 1972)
(for CPH)

a cold day -
our tears are all frozen
into hard smiles.
The same axe
splintered all our dreams.
But on the thousandth day
we rise again:

More bitter and more silent,
but still with instinct to survive, endure,
forget, and love again.

________________

Charmian continued:

I came from a convent where truth was absolutely paramount. If a teacher told a girl off for talking in class, another girl’s hand would shoot up straight away: “Please, Sister, it was my fault actually,” and that herd mentality protected the group, so honesty paid off.

Westminster certainly protected its own. It was educating the political and legal class – the sins of youth were probably expected, even covered up.

People were always laughing at other people there, mocking the sensitive. I think if you laugh at someone (not in entertainment but in ridicule)  it is the least intelligent, least curious response to that person and is just expressing a fait accompli superiority devoid of moral growth. Lots of people laughed at my poems and thought I was oversensitive but, mind you and touch wood, I’m not in prison am I?  Abuse of a metaphor is not yet a criminal offence!

These are extracts from Charmian’s teenage diaries:

________________

1970

August

in evening i went to see Chris Paul-Huhne. He has grown his hair – much nicer!!! Chris edits a v. serious magazine called Free Press, one shilling and he and others spend hundreds on it.

12th September

Chris looked super. we sold Free Press in market and tube station. moved to pop concert but lost Chris – saw him disappear in car with girl on his lap.

13th September

Chris apologised and said while we were in market he and pals were at tube looking for us. he’d gone on to party and we’d have gone too if we’d found him.

31st October

In morn shopped at Kensington Market. Bought purple vest/shirt. In afternoon went to Chris’s. Marcus W was there. Chris wilfully flared the lighter in my face and tried to singe my eyebrow! My god, he could have singed my eye and blinded me!! He tried to make me jealous by saying about a house party next Saturday. We left with Free Press. In evening Mish asked us round. We tried ringing Chris to see if anything on. Was not on.

1971

14th April

Went to see Chris. He was having breakfast. This time he played the piano and sung his own combination. God! Actually he’s got quite a good voice. When the romantic moment came, he told me I owed him 14/6pence for the Free Press I’d sold.

23rd April

Chris wanted his cash so i gave it to him out of sponsor cash.

31st May

Went to Chris’s. He seemed pleased to see me and asked me in. He kept staring at me. I said I was either Marxist or Labour and he said he’d send me Manifesto of Communism for birthday. I told him date.

4th June

My birthday. No manifesto from Chris.

18th July

In evening went to see Chris. He said I embarrassed him as I represented his childhood. Then he said I’d changed a lot since he last saw me and was mature.  he said I had… an air of serenity. We listened to records. He is a very deep person.

________________

After she read these diary entries from Charmian, my eternally-un-named friend said to me:

“Well, if he can sing, he should write a song in prison. He might get a pardon if he writes a good one. Or he could sing Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree…”

Tantalisingly, Charmian told me:

“I had to edit and cut those extracts as they presented him in rather an unfair light!”